Night, Again

Night, Again is an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese fiction, edited by Linh Dinh.

Published in 1996 by Seven Stories Press, then reissued in 2006 with two new stories, Night, Again features key authors emerging from the liberalization of Đổi Mới in the 1980s, as well as major writers living overseas.

The stories include:

III

The upheavals in the Communist world in the mid 1980s had profound repercussions in Vietnam. After the 1986 Party congress, the term Đổi Mới—or "Renovation", the Vietnamese version of glasnost, entered the vernacular. In literature, the new era was announced by Secretary General Nguyễn Văn Linh at a gathering of writers in October 1987. Admitting that the Party had been "less than democratic [in the past], and often dogmatic and brutal" in its treatment of writers. Linh promised to "unbind" them from that point on: "Speak the truth... No matter what happens, Comrades, don't curb your pen."

The Party was only conceding to what was already happening. The Đổi Mới literature can be traced to the appearances of novels by Ma Văn Kháng, Lê Lựu and Dương Thu Hương in 1985, 1986, 1987, respectively, with essays by the prominent critic Hoàng Ngọc Hiến and the writer-critic Nguyễn Minh Châu serving as catalysts. All had impeccable political pedigrees: Kháng, Lựu, Hương and Châu were Party members who had served in the war (Châu retired as a colonel); Hiến is the director of the Nguyễn Du writing school, originally modeled after the Gorky school in Moscow to develop Socialist writers.

Although the situation had been volatile, with books still being banned, editors fired and authors silenced, the government's tactics are not nearly as Draconian as in the past. In 1958, Nguyễn Hữu Đang, Thụy An and Trần Thiếu Bảo were slapped with 15-year sentences in kangaroo courts for their involvements in the Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm movement.

IV

The wide circulation of Dương Thu Hương's first novel, Bên kia bờ ảo vọng [The Other Side Of Illusion] (1987), established her as a vanguard for Đổi Mới literature. Though her roots are in Socialist Realism, Hương has broken from the movement's sanctioned subjects by listing Party members among her targets of criticism. Later, with the appearance of Những thiên đường mù [Paradise Of The Blind] (1988) and Tiểu thuyềt vô đề [Novel without a Name] (1994) in foreign translations, plus her increasing outspokenness and seven-month imprisonment in 1991, Hương became Vietnam's most visible writer and dissident. Politics notwithstanding, her gift as a writer is as a purveyor of the quotidian. In the word of one critic: "She is unmatched in her ability to capture the small, telling details of everyday life."

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